


The Moon Won't Listen

by Chyme



Category: Oban Star-Racers
Genre: Bad Dad Skills, Character Study, F/M, Father-Daughter Relationship, Life After Loss, bereavement, parental abandonment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-19 22:47:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5983228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chyme/pseuds/Chyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I love you, he thinks. And then, he never stops.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Moon Won't Listen

 

It’s a cold night, a night that nips at the toes and press down against the sleeves of his wrinkled pyjamas, a sharp, cold night, one he could get lost in. And he breathes out small, soft clouds that smell of beer.

I miss you, he thinks, looking half-crazed, staring up at the sliver shard of moon she had once decided to smash a piece of against her cheek, all in the form of a tattoo. I miss you and I don’t know how not to love, how to live, how to keep our daughter safe.

One thing he is certain of, however. He has to make sure Eva isn’t under the same roof as him.

 

\--------------------------

 

Years later, he stares up at another moon, several of them in fact, and all orbiting a strange, wondrous planet, so old and majestic and so far beyond any scholarly debate, that it hurts to remember the enthusiasm that had bubbled up when he first set foot here. It has been dampened somewhat, by how Molly can’t exercise the same restrain he can, how she can’t prevent herself from lapsing into the role of a star-struck tourist and risk turning up late to the next race.

It is a pity. Maya would have loved this place. She may even have reacted like Molly; perhaps that is why her behaviour irks him so.

But there is no point in over-thinking it. He looks up at the moon again.

I still miss you, he thinks, but don’t worry, I’m going to keep our Eva safe, you’ll see.

It just hurts that he is willing to use a strange, angry, teenage girl, who may in another life have been his daughter’s doppelganger, in order to do so.

 

\--------------------------

 

I love you...

He’s stumbling over his own words, his heart trembling from the whispered force of them as he stares down into his daughter’s uncertain eyes, a brown-red that runs both deeper and rarer than the colour or size of any moon in the cosmos. She has moved on, or tried to anyway, painted a star on her cheek in a touching sign that both honours her mother’s memory but stays different enough in order to slap him in the face with it. _Wake up Dad_ , it seems to sneer, _why couldn’t you have seen me, exactly where I was, under the same moon as you all along?_

He’s ashamed, ashamed to see the surprise on her face as he drags out those words that he hasn’t even had the courage to think about for the last ten years.

And then he watches her fly away and knows, with the same chilling certainty that had developed the day of his wife’s last race, that perhaps if he had really wanted her safe...well, perhaps he should have forced her to stay with him all along.

 

\--------------------------

 

Later, when it feels safe enough to say, I love you in the daylight, hand in hand with her as they go down to lay flowers on Maya’s grave, out on a planet that only has one moon...well, he feels as though he can breathe again.

The flowers stir under the wind and she rejoins her hand to his, soft and still a little unsure after all these years of wasted trust. He squeezes it softly in return.

‘I love you,’ he tells her.

And Eva, no longer a saviour or would-be Avatar, just a girl, simply rolls her eyes at him and says, in a long-suffering voice, ‘Dad, whatever you do, don’t start crying.’

Maya, he thinks, would have been happy enough with that.

 

\--------------------------

 

I love you, Don Wei thinks, thinks to the moon, to the sky, anywhere he thinks Maya could be, safe and happy. Anywhere that isn’t down on earth, beside him. I love you.

If she were here, he is convinced, he would never have let Eva go.

 

 


End file.
